The Player’s Tribune Takes On Sports Media

It is not uncommon for retiring professional athletes to make their way from the playing field to news organizations. Virtually every sports broadcast network’s pregame and postgame sets are laden with former players, and many outlets have run guest columns by onetime athletes. Some, like former NFL receiver Donte Stallworth, have even entered newswriting.

There is little precedent, though, for what Derek Jeter has done.

Jeter, the two-decade fixture at shortstop for the New York Yankees and in Major League Baseball All-Star Games, opted to start his own media outlet shortly after retiring at the end of last season.

The Players’ Tribune, which Jeter founded in October, publishes first-person essays with athletes’ bylines attached to them. The Tribune doesn’t have reporters covering beats or even a specific set of topics it tends to touch on. So far, it’s simply been a clearinghouse for professional and amateur athletes to publish what they think. The Tribune, by its own explanation, wants to be “The Voice of the Game.”

New York Yankees Derek Jeter returns to the dugout during a game against the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday July 29, 2007 at Camden Yards in Baltimore. /Keith Allison

The website is an extension of a growing trend in sports media in the past decade, during which professional and college teams dove further and further into in-house media, shaping their own messages for public consumption without always relying on the reporting of beat writers.

With The Players’ Tribune, players are not just bypassing sports journalists in communicating with fans. They’re end-running everybody, including their own teams.

“They’re essentially trying to break their own news and put their own message in their own way,” said James Wagner, who covers the Washington Nationals for The Washington Post. “Teams have been doing that kind of progressively over time. I don’t know if Jeter’s website really does anything different other than keeps doing that.”

Mike Harris, a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, said The Players’ Tribune is a simple extension of an in-house media environment that reporters have dealt with for years.

“Athletes have had these outlets and have used them for years, but I think the smart consumer of sports news knows that they’re getting,” Harris said. “If you want unfiltered information, if you want both sides, I think the traditional media will still do that.”

He recalled late 2009, when Tiger Woods’s family struggles derailed his golfing career and sent Woods into a spiral from which he still hasn’t professionally recovered.

“When he had those issues a few years ago after crashing into a tree,” Harris said, “how much did you read about that at TigerWoods.com?”

Some of The Players’ Tribune’s work has earned heavy praise. An essay by Los Angeles Clippers forward Blake Griffin, published when the site launched in October, offered a first-person account of Griffin’s interactions with Donald Sterling, the former team owner whom the NBA exiled after a series of racist remarks came to light last year. It gained wide traction.

“I think it’s a good idea, to be honest,” said Daniel Popper, assistant sports editor of The Diamondback, the University of Maryland’s independent student newspaper. “Some of the pieces I’ve read on there have actually added a lot of context to specific issues.” He cited Griffin’s words on Sterling, specifically.

In other corners, sports journalists have expressed varying degrees of either scorn or concern about The Players’ Tribune. Some doubt its authenticity as an information disseminator, while others have mocked it for faux imitations of more traditional media.

For one thing, The Tribune has said it means to showcase the “unfiltered voices” of its featured athletes, but, as Deadspin unearthed in late January, censored a sexually suggestive tweet from its official account written by Arizona Cardinals defensive lineman Darnell Dockett. The tweet, about the anatomy of a New England Patriots cheerleader, was surely inappropriate, but its removal called into question the authenticity of the site’s claim to be fully organic.

To that same end, it’s not possible to verify whether most of the site’s content was ghostwritten or actually published by the athletes on its bylines. Despite the hellish schedules pro and amateur athletes face, many, it seems, have found time to churn out lengthy, polished work.

“People always question what you write,” Wagner said. “You can’t help but wonder if the players are always writing it themselves.”

The site clearly wants to portray itself as more a journalism outlet than one for public relations. New York Mets pitcher Matt Harvey recently took the title of “New York City Bureau Chief.” Griffin is a “senior editor,” as is Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson. United States men’s national soccer team goalkeeper Brad Guzan is a “contributor, while Kobe Bryant — in the midst of an NBA season — found the time to be the “editorial director.”

“I think I have figured out something about how these titles work,” wrote Craig Calcaterra of NBC’s Hardball Talk. “I think they’re about the athletes trolling journalists.”

A media-relations representative for The Players’ Tribune did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

As time has gone by, the balance of power between sports journalists and the subjects they cover has shifted. With the Internet, teams have more image control than ever before, and perhaps it shouldn’t surprise anyone that players are, more and more, speaking for themselves.

“They’re obviously controlling the message. It’s essentially as if they’d write a letter to the editor or an op-ed or an opinion piece,” Wagner said.

In the months and years ahead, The Players’ Tribune – and perhaps other outlets like it — will seek sturdy footing, while beat writers and more traditional sports media continually jockey for news and content from the outside. The dynamic, as ever, is bound to change, but nobody knows yet how, or by how much.

“As a journalist, it’s kind of threatening because you don’t know if that will become the norm and, I don’t want to say make journalists’ writing obsolete, but that’s sort of the trend,” Popper said. “It’s a little disconcerting in that sense, but I think right now, it adds a lot of interesting context and sort of an interesting angle.”

Harris doesn’t think much will change for traditional sports journalism, even though, he said, The Players’ Tribune would get “a lot of eyeballs.”

“Schools and athletes have had their own websites for years,” Harris said. “We’ve been in direct competition with university and professional team websites for I don’t know how long.”